Albert Moll’s Ambivalence about Homosexuality and His Marginalization as a Sexual Pioneer

The names of pioneers such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld, who carved out sexology as a new scientific field, are well-known. However, others whose thought was crucial to the field have largely been neglected. The German neurologist Albert Moll (1862–1939) is certainly one of them. His name, to be sure, appears frequently in historical works about sexuality, but his life and work warrant more attention than they have received so far. If in the early twentieth century Moll was one of the best-known experts in sexology in Central Europe, his fame had waned by the time he died on 23 September 1939, on the very same day as Freud. His reputation was eclipsed by the widespread adoption of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and by Hirschfeld’s prominence as an epoch-making protagonist of sexual reform and the homosexual rights movement. Unlike Freud and Hirschfeld, with whom Moll was engaged in bitter conflicts, he did not establish a school or activist movement. Nor did he ever hold a university position, meaning that he lacked the opportunity to have students and followers who might have taken up and popularized his work.

By the 1890s, before Freud, Ellis, and Hirschfeld became influential, Moll had already elaborated the most comprehensive and sophisticated sexual theory to date. But his innovative and ingenious reflections on sexuality, including biological as well as psychological and sociocultural factors, have received far less attention from historians of sexuality and in lesbian and gay studies than those of his contemporaries. When his contributions to sexology are mentioned at all, it is often only in passing and in a one-sided and judgmental way. His antagonism toward the putatively enlightened and progressive views of Freud and Hirschfeld have led many commentators to highlight his political conservatism and regressive views of homosexuality and to therefore overlook his more innovative thinking about sexuality.¹ Moll’s life and works are full of contradictions, and they reflect some of the ambiguities in the development of the modern science and politics of sexuality.

In this article I highlight how Moll’s understanding and changing judgment of homosexuality vacillated between three explanatory frameworks: gender inversion, sexual object choice, and age disparity. Whereas the first one had been typical of new biomedical theories since the late nineteenth century, the second instead pointed to the future, and the third drew on older patterns of thinking about homosexual behavior. Moll’s changing and partly contradictory views of homosexuality were not only intertwined with his ingenious explanations of sexuality in general but also related to the variety of same-sex practices that he witnessed, his professional interests as a private psychotherapist, his antagonistic position vis-à-vis Hirschfeld and Freud, and his mixed feelings about homosexual emancipation and the impact of sexology on society. I will demonstrate how all of these factors throw light on the ambiguities of sexual modernity and may also explain Moll’s eventual marginalization in sexology and sexual history, even though his work now actually seems less outdated than that of some of his colleagues.²

Moll’s Controversial Reputation

From around 1890, Moll ran a thriving private practice in West Berlin for nervous and mental disorders. He belonged to a group of doctors who from the mid-1880s on began to apply hypnotism and other psychological methods to the treatment of psychosomatic complaints, including addictions, sexual problems, and “perversions,” in particular, homosexuality.³ In addition, he regularly served in court as an expert witness on the mental state and legal responsibility of defendants, in particular, sexual offenders. He was an elected member of various medical associations and a consultant in matters of public health and military medicine, roles that led to direct communication with government and police officials. His public visibility was boosted through his regular contributions to public debates, his role in sensational trials, and his association with intellectual and aristocratic circles.

Within little more than ten years, Moll published pioneering and well-received books about hypnosis, sexuality, and medical...